Consider the official web banner. It's a bit small but if you look hard you will see that the competitors shown on this banner are all slim young 20 or 30-somethings but the tennis player is.... well he's an old grey haired guy.
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| See what I mean? |
How is it then that of all the sports, tennis is the one singled out for veneration?
I'd entered the 60+ singles and doubles and the mixed doubles with Viv and certainly I didn't think much of anything as we dutifully practiced for a week before the start of the games. Yes, practice! I know. Who practices? Well we did and funnily enough practice went well and we were feeling pretty good about things.
Fitness was fine, no major aches and pains that ibuprofen cannot cure (at least for a while), getting our rhythm back after our sojourn away. Things were Ok and then we got our credentials saying "Athlete" and I felt pretty good about it even if I didn't look at the picture on the thing that closely at the time. Nobody's ever called me an athlete before, so I thought this was good.
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| Don't look at the picture! |
Then the draw came out and it has to be said that it was pretty thin. Format was round robin for groups of 3-5 and then playoffs for medal places. Singles managed two groups but doubles and mixed was only one group. And... get this.... and everyone I played in the singles was older than me. Most of the others were too. And not just older than me, but much older than me. And in the mixed the other lady was in her 50's!
What had happened was that the entry was small and there were in some classes only one or two entrants so the organizers decided to combine groups so as to give people a game. As many had come from abroad this was a good notion however what they had not recognized was that some people would only be around for a day or so, others for two or three and that some wouldn't show up at all.
Of my 4 scheduled matches, I played only 1 set and in that one set the other gentleman in question told me that he was 84 and that he couldn't carry on. He also told me that he was the Korean #1 at the over 75 level, so at least I beat a national champion. He was actually really good and I could see that a younger him would have knocked lumps off me.
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| I hope I'm still playing when I'm 84 |
But fortunately the younger him was not there... well actually he was. It was his younger brother, aged 82, whom I had played in our doubles round robin. He partnered his brother, my 84 year old singles opponent. And they had both given up after the first set. And he... or rather the younger brother... didn't show up for our singles match at all.
So even though I 'won' all 4 of my round robin matches, I had actually played and finished none of them.
In the doubles, we played our first match on the first day. Our opponents looked pretty aged and they said that they'd been combined in our group as there was nobody in the older age group. One guy was a teaching pro and the other said he was on the ITF Tour in the UK at the over 65 age group level. We managed to win that one and the next against a pair of Swiss volleyball players who were very jolly and soon became everyone's friends (they won the volleyball gold incidentally in their age group) and managed to squeak out a third victory against a pair from Guam who on the count back would be our final opponents too.
As for the mixed, well it rained and our opponents had a team meeting and one of them would be leaving tomorrow morning early and .... bit of a mess really. We had started and were comfortably ahead but well you know. We wanted to play.
And then it was finals time. First singles against a guy who was 6 months younger than me!! Whoopee!! Someone in my right age group. Nice chap. Local guy who happened to live mostly in New Zealand so we had to bring the game forward as he was leaving later that day... Fortunately the rain just about held off... and it was only just about, for everyone else had come off the court as the rain was lashing down at the end. I managed to squeak by again.
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| Lye Hock in action |
Next was doubles and I have to side track a bit here for my partner, a guy 2 years my junior, Lye Hock, would play whatever event was on the day and then have a shower and go out and play again in the regular daily social tennis evening after which would be socializing and dinner. I was pretty tired of all the socializing by this time and I wasn't playing daytime and evening like Lye Hock did. Iron man. And he did carry me too in case you were wondering. Doubles, men's, women's or mixed, is all about choosing the right partner!
The Guam guys in the doubles were a mix. One really tall Korean who'd won a bronze medal at table tennis and a really short guy (Guamese?) who liked to take charge and served from about 6 feet behind the base line. He wouldn't tell me why and for the life of me I cannot understand the point of it. I presume it works for him though otherwise he wouldn't do it. Anyway we again squeaked by these guys.
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| The guys from Guam |
This is where the point of this blog kicks in again as it was only now that the photos started being taken and as we'd been competitors and won some matches, we were in a few of them. It wasn't so bad at the time as ... well let's face it, we never feel like we're the age we are. We think inside that we are like we were at some point in time. Mine is about 25. So it comes as a shock when you look at the outcome and think "just who is that old guy?" And then "lord, it's me!" And finally "Do I really look that old?"
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| The memory... |
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| The reality. Do I really look that old? |
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| My favorite though! |
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